Chameleon/features
Graphics Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit uses fully deferred lighting. However, Alex Fry then states that the engine is more a hybrid, using deferred and forward rendering in situations that make sense; explaining some of the demands they had for the world which were huge expansive vistas with lots and lots and lots of lights and lots and lots and lots of trees and alpha... the deferred rendering made more sense as they can combine more of the full-screen operations into a single full-screen pass, they don't have to pay for any overdraw. So for that particular operation the deferred renderer makes sense. They went for full high dynamic range with filmic tone-mapping and the rest but had this requirement that you can't really miss with a Need for Speed game which is that the cars are the stars. The cars are absolutely the stars of the show. We had to have the best-looking, smoothest, curved to the paint, minute details, totally authentic cars with phenomenal lighting... we had to have all of that. Rendering Techniques "It's all totally real-time and it's one of the things we're most pleased about with this game: the cars had to look amazing at all times of the day, anywhere in that world. Image-based lighting then... it means that the cars light themselves based on the image around them." — Alex FryTech Interview: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit • Page 2 The cars are using a forward renderer. They're part of the hybrid. They still have a huge amount of lights attached but one of the greatest strengths of the car is that they use image-based lighting. Image-based lighting essentially means that the cars are lit by the image of the environment around them. So if you put that car anywhere in the world, it will be lit correctly. You haven't got to fake it, you haven't got to bake it. The cars are real-time image-based lit. That's one of the reasons they look good. When driving into a tunnel they don't have to place any probes to capture some light here, capture some light there, it's all dynamic. So when driving into a tunnel, one can start to see the car get dark at the front while remaining bright at the back. Drive into the tunnel and the light will roll over, and then go underneath some spotlights in the tunnel and one can see beautiful specular soft lights roll over the car. You'll get to the open side and one side of the car will start to roll into the light and you'll see all these different frequencies like the really sharp reflection of the lacquer over the top to this sort of blurred diffuse underlying paint beneath it and you'll see all of these different layers building themselves up. The engine is three to four times more powerful than Burnout Paradise's in terms of the rendering side of things. Tools "This whole workflow is a game-changer, and so that's what it's called, the asset database is called Game Changer." — Alex FryTech Interview: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit • Page 3 Similar to the run-time it's version 2.0 of the tools. With Paradise they built this thing around an asset database of their own so they could have this big world that wasn't an enormous file, it's a database full of bits of world. They took that idea, hugely improved the backend database so it's orders of magnitude faster and generally a lot more reliable. The old asset manager was called Game Explorer. This is a complete rewrite of what they learned. It's about a hundred times faster. They've got over a quarter of a million parts that make up the game in this database. It's a relational database but it's fully branchable and fully version controlled. The guys that wrote it aren't aware of anything like it that exists. There might well be one but we've not read about it. We can just build a new part off for a demo, we can build new parts and branch them back, we've got history and everything. It's all totally relational so they can find what's connected to whatever else so we know that this texture is attached to this bit of world and that bit of world, this animation is applied to that... It's fully traceable so we can traverse the game world up and down. That was all-new for this. It's all live-updatable so you can slide sliders and move light placements or right click and update a texture, it's all live and you can connect to multiple consoles at once and do it all there. Sources Category:Engine features subpages